New postal reform legislation could pass during the current lame duck session of Congress in which members of the outgoing body tries pass legislation they didn’t get to before the election.

Congress could conceivably sneak through a bill that could cut six-day-a-week mail delivery, replace door-to-door mail delivery with neighborhood cluster boxes, close more and possibly further tinker with or cut postal worker benefits and produce other abhorrent results, according to the American Postal Workers Union http://www.apwu.org/news/deptdiv-news-article/what-expect-lame-duck-congress.

All this is worth thinking about since last postal reform bill, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 was pushed through during that session. That’s the law that established the annual $5.8 billion obligation for the USPS to pay to cover he healthcare costs of future retirees until nearly the next century.

The PAEA, which took 11 years to pass, did do some good such as establishing small predictable annual postage increases in place of the random haphazard system in place beforehand.

But the law did sneak in some very dangerous provisions that essentially created the USPS’s financial calamities. Plus it was not well publicized: news of its passage, for instance, was buried deep in an inside page of the New York Times when it came out during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day that year

So it’s quite possible something like this could happen again.

Maybe not. After all, the legislative process leading to the PAEA was effectively completed when the pre-funding provision was slipped into it.

The current postal reform proposals have not cleared committee in either the House or Senate and the entire process will likely have to begin afresh next year.

Meanwhile, the USPS’s financial mess goes on and on even though the service has greatly cut its costs over the past few years.

For the year ended Sept.Sept.30, the USPS reported a net loss of $5.6 billion for as compared to a net loss of $5.1 billion last year. Without the healthcare obligation, the postal service would have reported net income of approximately $200 million in 2016 http://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2016/pr16_092.htm.

Of course, a lot of this cost cutting has come from closing distribution facilities and post offices and lowering service standards made possible from firing employees. And the USPS shows no sign of stopping this despite persistent opposition from Congress as well as business and labor groups.

But the USPS’s well documented problems and efforts to stay alive in face of everything has not stopped ultra-right-wing bloviators like the American Spectator from calling for the abolition of the postal service’s mail monopoly which would supposedly open the postal service to competition and make it more efficient https://spectator.org/keeping-the-postal-service-from-going-postal/.

Besides deliberately misunderstanding the causes of the USPS’s persistent deficits, the publication reflexively calls for diminishing the nation’s oldest most trusted and even most reliable institution.

As ridiculous and deranged as this argument seems let’s hope it doesn’t come to the attention of President Trump.